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Eve picked up files, headed out. “Roarke’s already in Observation because he feels the same.”

“Are you sure you don’t want Mira here?”

“She can review the record, evaluate Smith tomorrow. No point dragging her out for this tonight. I already know Smith isn’t likely to pass the legal sanity level. It doesn’t matter.”

“It chaps my thighs,” Peabody complained. “Jesus, Dallas, she was planning to go after you.”

“I like that part.” Shook her up, Eve mused, just as planned. Added to those rewrites and shook things up.

“Think of it this way,” she continued. “There’s a very interesting woman alive and well tonight because we worked the case and bagged a killer. There are four other people who won’t have to worry about having a target on their backs. Add DeLano, possibly her family. And if she’d slipped through on us, she wouldn’t have stopped there. I’m not talking about me.”

“I don’t know if DeLano would have published the next Dark novel if Smith was at large.”

“She wouldn’t have stopped,” Eve repeated. “I think she’d have used her own failed novel. The killer hero. I think she’s always been going there. And once she took on that role, she’d have had a lot of pages to fill.”

Eve paused outside the Interview door. “Ready?”

“So ready.”

Eve stepped in. “Dallas, Lieutenant Eve, and Peabody, Detective Delia, entering Interview with Smith, Ann Elizabeth, on the matters of …” She paused as if to check her files, rattled off the case numbers.

She sat, waited for Peabody to take the other chair. “Have you been read your rights, Ms. Smith?”

When Smith didn’t respond, just sat head down, shoulders hunched, arms defensively across her chest, Eve shrugged. “I happen to know you were—once you regained consciousness and had medical treatment—as I read them to you myself. As the record will show. But we’ll go over them again. We’ve got all the time in the world.”

Eve recited the Revised Miranda, waited. “Do you understand your rights and obligations in this matter? If you don’t, I can explain them to you point by point. Like I said, all the time in the world.”

Smith mumbled.

“Please speak up for the record.”

“I understand.”

“Good. I’m going to be straight with you, Ann. We’ve got you cold on three counts of murder—that’s first degree—and one count of attempted murder. We’ve got your—let’s call it your storyboard and your drafts of plotlines for future victims. We’ve got the ice pick you used to kill Chanel Rylan along with the printout of the vid ticket placing you in the theater that night. We’ve got your reversible coat—and the security feed showing you entering and exiting the theater. We have an eyewitness placing you outside the flop where Rosie Kent was strangled, and the drug you used to knock her out.”

Eve flipped through the files. “Oh, yeah, we have the red hair dye and a couple of blue faux hairs that will match the blue dreads recovered a short distance from Screw U—you yanked out some of your own hair when you pulled them off, so we also have that. Then there’s the club itself, where we have additional eyewitnesses verifying you ordered the drink you then doctored and served to Loxie Flash. Then there’s the mink hoodie you stole—let’s go ahead and add that charge of grand theft while we’ve got you here.

“Are you following me here, Ann?”

Smith shifted her eyes up for an instant. The right showed the bruising and swelling caused by a dead-on backhanded blow. Eve saw the flicker of temper before Smith lowered her gaze again.

Good. She’d fan the flames.

“I can sit here and list all the evidence we have against you, but you already know all that. You may not know that I’ve just gotten a report from our lab, from our expert on hair and fiber. The coat you left behind at the club? She found both hair and fiber on it—you were in a hurry, after all. A strand of hair that matches the hair taken from a brush in your apartment, and the blue dreads. Some fibers from the clothes you wore the night you killed Loxie Flash match clothes recovered from your apartment. She put a rush on that work for me, so we can wrap this up, nice and neat.

“She’ll find trace on the reversible coat, too. And, you know, there’s just a little bit of blood on the sleeve of the reversible coat—the dark side. You probably didn’t notice, but we did. It’s going to be Chanel Rylan’s blood.”

Eve sat back, slid photos of the dead out of the file. “So, sloppy work, Ann. Careless, sloppy work.”

Smith’s shoulders tightened. She shook her head.

“Oh, yeah, sloppy and careless. Since we’ve got that in the bag, let’s move on to motive. We’ve got that, too. Blaine DeLano and her Dark series. We’re big fans, aren’t we, Peabody?”

“I love those books. Can’t get enough. The way Dark hunts down the bad guys? Man, she’s smart. And she’s fearless.”

“She’s a thief,” Smith muttered.

“Sorry, did you say something?” Peabody asked.


Tags: J.D. Robb In Death Mystery